Wealth didn’t matter so much to Pajitnov. He had traveled the world because of his creation, and his fans were legion. Now there are fifty variants of the game, including one for the Apple iPad. It has been downloaded digitally more than one hundred million times. People flock to new versions of Tetris—to this day. Its soothing, addicting game mechanics always lure new fans, and every online game site of note has a version to play. And the money continues to roll in for Pajitnov. Now, when he goes to his window in Bellevue, Washington, and looks out upon a rainy day, his mind relaxes and he still sees those mesmerizing falling blocks in front of his eyes. They are part of his essence. At that moment when the blocks fall, there is nothing else present. He is not in Russia anymore. He is not in the United States. He is transported somewhere else. He is Tetris. And he is free.
* The complex and often sordid tale of the grab for Tetris rights is detailed in a truly great book about videogames, David Sheff’s Game Over (Random House, 1993).
THE RISE OF ELECTRONIC ARTS
William “Trip” Hawkins III hatched a plan for world domination through games very early in his life. From the age of ten onward, the son of a San Diego marketing executive wanted to overcome people with emotion so big, so overwhelming, so heart-stirring, that when they played a computer game they would cry. Just like the movies he loved, such as Apocalypse Now; just like the music he rocked out to, like the Rolling Stones and the Stooges. But it was more than that. Hawkins, nicknamed Trippy by his grandmother because he was the third William in the family, wanted to make games into a new kind of life experience. Even before he graduated from high school, the plan ballooned beyond a childish yearning. By the time he got to Harvard, it was a full-blown obsession. Hawkins wanted games to move, the way Steven Spielberg said movies should. He had the stuff to do it too, all the good looks and charm of a Golden Age movie star. And he possessed from his father the savvy saleman’s instincts and work ethic of a young Willy Loman. From his mother, an Emmy award–winning producer who founded the San Diego chapter of the National Organization for Women, he got his assertive nature. Trip Hawkins had it all.
But it almost didn’t happen. The idea for Electronic Arts, a company that would become the biggest and most influential of the computer game makers, was almost quashed. It was nearly killed at supposedly liberal-minded Harvard University in the 1970s.
On an autumn day in October 1973, when Trip Hawkins was walking past Wigglesworth Hall, he had his latest eureka moment about computer games. Hawkins realized he wanted to invent his own major. He wanted to major in strategy and applied videogame theory. He was so jolted by his concept that he began walking more quickly to an appointment with his faculty advisor. Despite his wit, his charm, and a prepared spiel he’d fashioned for the academic administrator, the professor said no. Not just no. As he showed Hawkins the door, he said, “You are wasting your time at Harvard by monkeying around with games.” So Hawkins walked past University Hall in a fit of anger. He did not, as many have done, touch the shoe of the polished bronze statue of John Harvard for good luck—for the grudging gods of luck had evaded him. He felt that Harvard didn’t want him. And if Harvard didn’t want him, he was going to drop out. He would go somewhere that more fully comprehended his plan for the big picture, somewhere that would value him as the visionary he was so certain he was. But another, more beneficent Harvard counselor saw the passion in Hawkins’s face and heard the sense Hawkins made when talking about his proposal. By the end of that meeting, Hawkins had his major, and he aced nearly every sociology and communications course and every independent study as well. For his thesis, he wrote a World War III computer simulation that was very interactive and, perhaps, equally annoying. Part of its development had Hawkins going into students’ rooms to stir them at three a.m. to gauge how they would deal with futuristic war scenarios. In addition, he programmed his first computer game simulation on a PDP-11 computer at Harvard. It predicted that Miami would beat Minnesota 23–6 in the Super Bowl. The real score was 24–7.
Once he was out of college, however, Hawkins saw there were no takers for his particular form of passionate expertise. He felt ignored and unappreciated. But to those who would lend an ear, Hawkins would begin an oration: “There will be a revolution in computer games that will make games bigger than the movie industry. It’s coming soon. You better get on board, or you’ll be left behind.” Even those who deigned to listen looked at Hawkins suspiciously. They often responded, “Man, what the hell are you smoking?” So Hawkins returned to California and went to Stanford for an MBA. When he finished, he still couldn’t find the right job in the nascent world of games. So he took at job at Apple Computer. As employee number sixty-eight and the company’s inaugural MBA, Hawkins was the first person at Apple to tackle the job of marketing.
Within a year, Hawkins had worked his way up to an executive position at Apple. He was in the right place at the right time. Apple was the “it” company. Like Apple today, with the iPod and iPhone, the company could do little wrong. The media hyped the Apple II personal computers, and business (“an elixir for U.S. industry,” glowed the New York Times) and families loved the quality the technicians put into each piece of equipment. The computers, although fairly expensive, almost sold themselves, so much so that in his four years at Apple, Hawkins became a rich man with a niche he carefully carved for himself and his team: selling the computers to medium and large businesses. By 1981, the self-described computer nerd had developed the smoothest of swaggers and an indestructible yet affable egotism that would lead him to say with a wink that he was “smarter than Bill Gates and better looking than Steve Jobs.”
When he wasn’t selling computers, he was thinking about computer games. Late into the night, when his marketing work at Apple was done, he would loosen his tie and sit down at his Apple II to map out a business plan for a new company without a name. He already had his big idea: games about sports, ones that made you feel you were inside the game, whether you were coaching or playing. Games so intense that you could smell the sweat, the confidence, and the fear. To a select few, like his understanding pal Bing Gordon, he would posit, “You know those Strat-O-Matic baseball and football games from the sixties, the ones you would play with a pencil and paper? I want to make those for the personal computer. I want them to have good graphics and I want them to be endorsed by sports celebrities. Not just celebrities—superstars. I want the superstars to be in the game. The biggest. The biggest of the big.” Each night, he continued to refine the idea, calculating a five-year plan with precise budgets and room for game designer creativity that had never before been seen in games.
In creating his own company, Hawkins was inspired by the popular nonfiction of the time, like Geoffrey Stokes’s Starmaking Machinery, about the rise and fall of the star-crossed Southern rock band Commander Cody. He also devoured Steven Bach’s Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven’s Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, about the disastrous making of director Michael Cimino’s beautifully filmed western, during which the film’s budget ballooned to $44 million, at that time the most expensive film in history. Hawkins vowed to avoid the mistakes of the music and movie industries. He told potential investors, “Not only will my company become the next big media company, videogames can be artistic and the people who make them should be treated like artists.” Finally, the Masters of the Universe involved in those long-established media companies began to believe him. Cranky, straight-shooting venture capitalist Don Valentine gave the game maker $2 million through Capital Management, the company well known for its funding of technology start-ups like Bushnell’s Atari. Hawkins had already reached into his bank account to pour $200,000 of his own savings into a company he called Amazin’ Software. The company name was like a mirror image of Hawkins himself, down-to-earth with a g-dropped gerund and full of blustering hubris. Yet Hawkins’s current reality was humble. He and the early hires were ensconced within a minuscule office given to him rent-free within the Capita
l Management complex.
Within six months, he had hired eleven people, including hire number seven, the brawny Bing Gordon, a failed actor who once waited tables at the New York City punk hangout Max’s Kansas City. Gordon had tried many endeavors before games, including working on a shrimp boat and, according to Hawkins, acting in a porn film. He got into games after immersing himself in a business project about the Channel F game console while studying for an MBA at Stanford, and found that he thrived making computer entertainment. But he often disagreed with Hawkins’s business decisions. Within six months, the company moved to larger digs. Office meetings, however, were invariably loud, and not merely because the employees were psyched about their endeavors. Just outside the window, roaring planes took off from a runway at the San Francisco International Airport. Yet it wouldn’t have mattered if the office had faced a garbage dump. Hawkins had the touch.
Early on, Hawkins made decisions like an early movie mogul: He bet with his gut as much as his brain, choosing people he called artists based on not just their reputation as programmers, but whether or not he believed their ideas were a cut above the rest. His careful choice of words, the fact that he was calling kids who were fresh out of college “artists,” had the salubrious effect of intriguing investors from the realms of movies and music. At the time, everything done at the company overflowed with originality. But no one really liked the name Amazin’ Software. To name the baby, Hawkins took the group of eleven employees to the beach at Pajaro Dunes, California, for the weekend. The varied species of birds chirped, the Monterey Bay waves washed against the fan-shaped beach, and all day the game makers argued about the name. With a bonfire ablaze and booze flowing, the motley crew settled on Electronic Arts during an all-night brainstorming session. The name was a riff on United Artists, the movie company formed by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith to give the artists more creative control in a Hollywood dominated by the often oppressive star system. But not everyone in the group of eleven had their say. A couple of them became too tired or too drunk and had gone to sleep by the time the name was finalized at two a.m. They had to live with the name even if they didn’t like it.
If you saw Hawkins’s crew at a convention, they looked like they were richer and smarter than anyone else. They all had MBAs, while all the other nerds were dressed in T-shirts and jeans. Sure, they were full of themselves, thinking they could perform miracles with software. But they could back it up too. The company’s early offerings included an educational collaboration with Timothy Leary, a pun-filled role playing game called A Bard’s Tale, and the exceptional Pinball Construction Set designed by Bill Budge, in which you could make your own pinball tables. But none of the games were runaway megahits. Then Hawkins remembered an old television ad for the unctuous hair product Vitalis. The hair care company aired a series of TV commercials that featured a one-on-one basketball matchup. It was kind of a basketball rendition of Home Run Derby, where the shooting of hoops was shown as short, one-minute vignettes. Hawkins told Gordon and the gang, “I want us to make a one-on-one basketball game. My hero in sports is Dr. J [Julius Erving], and he has a natural foil, Larry Byrd.” Gordon, who was a sports fan himself, loved the concept.
Despite Hawkins’s bluster, it was difficult to see the art within those early floppy disks. Dr. J and Larry Bird Go One on One was little more than two stick figures battling it out on an unadorned basketball court. But what you could see in the title was Hawkins’s penchant for using superstars in his games to help sell them. Hawkins not only wanted to rub elbows with the greats, he wanted to be a superstar himself. But he could not be a superstar, a true superstar, until Electronic Arts made “The Football Game.” Hawkins’s real passion was football. He pored over plays and what made them work like a fanatical amateur coach. After Hawkins attended the NFC Championship football game in 1982, in which Joe Montana hurled a football to receiver Dwight Clark, a fantastic completion simply known as “The Catch,” he approached the former Notre Dame star and asked him to work on his computer football game. Hawkins was discouraged to learn that the quarterback already had a long-term deal with Atari. Undaunted, he sought out a more minor subject, the tequila-loving Joe Kapp, who was a former football chucker for the Minnesota Vikings.
In a conversation on the UC Berkeley football field, where Kapp was football coach, Hawkins proposed, “I’ll pay you a consulting fee if you give me some pointers on how to make an authentic game.”
Kapp, who had a mammoth ego, perhaps because he was an actor in successful films like The Longest Yard and Semi-Tough, looked down the field as if he had seen his quarterback throw an interception in the end zone. He shot back, “I want my name on that game and I want royalties, too. And I want my picture on the cover.” On the drive home, Hawkins thought, “If it’s going to go that way, I’m going to go to the front of the parade and get the biggest I can get, John Madden.” That wouldn’t be easy. Hawkins needed Madden—badly—but Madden didn’t need Hawkins. Madden already had his share of fame as the Super Bowl–winning coach of the Oakland Raiders who had parlayed his success and personality into a likeable, folksy style of TV football announcing. He also had authored a few bestselling books and was the affable pitchman for Miller Lite beer’s “Tastes Great, Less Filling” television campaign. (The New York Times judged that Madden made a “small fortune” for just the commercials.) Madden’s celebrity was growing as fast as his waistline. Because of his rising star, the former coach wanted a greater cash advance than Hawkins had given Julius Erving for the basketball game. Madden received a whopping $100,000, a huge amount for the time. But Erving had had the foresight to accept Electronic Arts stock at a very cheap price as partial payment. Madden declined the offer. To this day, Madden still jokes that accepting stock in the new videogame company could have made him a richer man in the late 1980s and beyond. But Madden, a pragmatist to a fault, wanted his money up front because he didn’t believe the newfangled technology would sell. In fact, he knew very little about computers and even less about computer games. The real reason he agreed to lend his name to the game was because he was teaching an extension class for football fans at the University of California and thought the game would be useful for his lectures and nothing else. (In the last twenty years, EA shares increased by 2,500 percent at their peak. Nonetheless, Madden is likely to have been paid between $75 and $100 million for lending his voice and name to the game during the last two decades.)
Even at the beginning of preproduction, it was not easy going, for Madden was a bit of a diva who didn’t live up to his everyman image. In fact, he could be mean and demeaning. Every other word Hawkins heard from Madden was the “F” word. It was amazing to the young CEO that Madden could put up a front on television without ever dropping the F bomb. Yet the winning coach’s input was invaluable. Hawkins traveled to meet Madden after a Broncos game in Denver and planned to take a two-day train ride with the airplane-phobic personality to Oakland. On the train, Hawkins asked Madden to create the playbook for the game, but Madden balked at a job of such immense proportion. Then, because of the data processing limitations of computers at the time, Hawkins, along with a game producer and game developer, suggested that the game be skeleton, a form of football that includes just seven players on each team. The blockers would be taken out, but all of the same plays would remain.
“Fuck that and fuck you people,” blurted Madden. “Either we do it fuckin’ right or we don’t fuckin’ do it at all.”
Hawkins wanted to do it “fuckin’ right” as well, but the road to release was filled with obstacles. Work on Madden took so long, and was so overbudget, that everyone at the burgeoning company became increasingly frustrated, even disheartened. Early investors began to worry that the Madden game could bankrupt the new company with the promising future. Most of EA’s other games were on schedule, making it to stores on time. But the football game was so often postponed that whispering employees began calling it Trip’s Folly. One day, as the planes grow
led from above the EA offices, Hawkins’s first hire, Rich Melmon, called a Madden meeting in a cramped conference room. Rich Hilleman, the game’s producer, and marketing whiz Bing Gordon began arguing about the seemingly endless production process. Soon, the volume of their words grew as loud as the din of the jets above. In a flash, the large men, who both played amateur hockey, were out of their chairs and in each other’s face. Melmon leaped out of the way as Gordon threw Hilleman into the wall hard, the way a hockey player would check the opposition into the boards. Hawkins told people that “the force left this big indentation in the wall that was about three feet high and about a foot and a half wide. It just caved the whole wall in. And Bing wrote a note on it, commemorating the occasion. None of us is afraid to bang heads and fight for what we believe in. Literally.”
After three years of game production and no end in sight, outside auditors trudged over to the Electronic Arts office and instructed Hawkins to expense and write off all the cash advances that the company had paid to John Madden. The auditors deemed them to be completely unrecoupable. They also wanted Hawkins to halt production on the game, then and there. Inside the new company, more staffers began laughing and joking about Trip’s Folly. This time, they weren’t just whispering. But to the young designers, there was one positive thing about Hawkins’s football game obsession. As Ray Tobey put it, “At least it will keep him away from interfering with our other projects.” Tobey was a boy genius, a brilliant but occasionally arrogant artistic phenomenon who was working on computer games while still in high school, toiling at babysitting jobs to pay for his $800 Commodore Pet 2001. Tobey spent most of his time at the computer trying to make a game that was as close to real life as a computer in the 1980s could make it. Through word of mouth, Tobey’s flying and shooting game based on F-15 fighter jets came to the attention of Apple’s Steve Wozniak when Tobey was just sixteen. Wozniak was wowed at the sound, graphics, and game play. He kept saying, “This can’t be done on the Apple II. I can’t believe it. This can’t be done.” He gave Tobey a calling card and added a note to Trip Hawkins, which read, “Please consider this flight simulator as the finest Apple game ever done.”
All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture Page 11
